Searching for clues of Vivian Maier’s long time undisclosed photographic work, it would be easy to argue: “She was an odd fish, no wonder she couldn’t relate to whatsoever audiences. Maybe she wasn’t ready for it.”

But truth be told, no one of us is ready for success and public exposure until those things reach us. Excavating Vivian Maier’s unseen, gigantic body of work provides insights into the kind of barriers that can block the release of creative potential – not only in her specific case, but on a more general level as well.

To anticipate the most blatant difficulty of visual publishing: it usually requires professional teamwork a layman doesn’t have access to. Important transitions are to be made: for a photographer, from the adventurous on-site shooting to the more tedious task of archiving and structuring the content for publishing, followed by its promotion and release. Without these transitions from creating to administrating and releasing the outcome, a project never becomes publishable.

The difficulty to connect the process of a visualization to the final product is not a mere problem of photography, it applies to other visual disciplines as well. As I was publishing this post I remembered a recent discussion I had in a very inspiring international graphic recording meetup, touching very similar topics.